Top 10 Ranking Factors for Local SEO in 2017

Author:
Ankit Goyal

For businesses, especially the small ones, it is very important to promote themselves in their local area. And Google, along with other search engines, has acknowledged this need long ago. This is why Local SEO came into the picture. Local SEO is specially optimized for local business to hit their targeted local markets and audience and get locally recognized through better search engine ranking.

To attract local customers for your business, it is crucial for local businesses to incorporate some of the Local SEO Ranking Factors in their digital marketing strategy.

With the help of these factors, you can rest assured that your local business is going to rank well in the search engine results. It can even shine brightly in the famous 3-pack results and that way, you can really strike it rich!

If you skip to incorporate any one or a combination of these factors in your digital marketing campaign, things might not work quite well for your search results. Avail expert SEO services so as you don’t miss the important factors for your local SEO strategy.

The top 10 ranking factors for your business’ local SEO are mentioned below:

1. Keywords

What is SEO without keywords?

Nothing!

The world of SEO, digital marketing, and the entire internet, revolves around keywords. To get the right keywords for your digital marketing and SEO campaigns, you can contact the professionals providing expert SEO services.

For better local SEO, the right usage of keywords must be paid a great heed to. If you ignore to use the right keywords for your local business, all the other SEO work that you do will prove out to be a wild goose chase.

So, make sure you or your SEO outsourcing company performs the following activities for the right usage and incorporation of keywords in your business’ online presence:

Conduct a thorough keyword research based on your products and services, business type, industry, locations, etc.

Avoid using technical jargon as keywords because your audience might not use technical words to search you

Use the name of your city in the keywords as it would boost local SEO effectiveness

Include the local keywords in the meta tags and meta description of your website

Thus, with the right research and the right usage of keywords, you’ll be able to bring your business in the top search engine results.

2. Address Details

For your business to gain a face on the internet and to get recognized and rightly contacted by the audience, it is required that you put your business address in the right manner.

Especially, if your business is localized and you offer services to only the local customers, it becomes mandatory for you to insert the address rightly. The address is shown as a part of your business information, by the search engines and is displayed when your audience searches for you. You can use expert SEO services to set your address right.

The experts use tools like schema.org or JSON-LD to add the business address with the search engines in the right way.

3. Google My Business

There is no denying the fact that Google is the granddad of all the other search engines. So, you’ll dig a goldmine if your business is displayed on the first page of Google.

However, the business ranking on Google is incomplete without your business being claimed on the Google My Business (GMB) listing. To get your business located on the Google My Business, contact the best and cheap SEO services or you can do it yourself through the Google My Business menu.

With your business listed on GMB, it becomes highly convenient for your audience to locate you on Google. The GMB listings show your business with the complete address, give you an option to link your website to the listing, and give direction to your audience through Google Maps. What else do you need?

Another plus of the GMB listings is that your business is shown with the reviews given to your business by your existing or previous customers. So, to maintain a great Google reputation, you can ask your customers to give you 5 stars on Google.

4. Targeted Localized Content

To target the local audience, you need to have all their attention and this is possible with the help of the targeted localized content. You can do so by generating content that is specific to your city or area.

You can take help from an SEO outsourcing company to generate SEO-optimized localized content for your website or social media handles and see things turn to your favor. The localized content is a bait for the local customers as they are always attracted to the happenings, events, news, and offers going on in their areas. And you can make profits out of it!

5. Business Directories

The online business directories or citations hold the information and details of all the local businesses. These are similar to that of the old-school Yellowbook.

Well-optimized local listings pages created by the professionals delivering expert SEO services allow you to make your way to the top search engine results through the reputed listings.

Most of the times, while the customers are searching for a business, these directories show a compiled result of the similar businesses available around the areas and your business can be one of them! And this can be done rightly with the help of an SEO outsourcing company.

A few examples of the most famous business directories are – Yelp, Yellow Pages, FunnIs.Local, Bing Places, Yahoo Local, etc.

You can locate your business on these listings with easy steps or you can avail cheap SEO services for the right creation of listing profiles.

6.Good Review

For a business, what’s better than a good review?

When your prospects learn something positive about your business and the services you provide, they become more curious to do business with you. It also helps them remove the doubts that they might have for you.

Thus, focus on bagging a great number of good reviews. A competent SEO outsourcing company can help you get some great reviews on business listings, GMB listings, Facebook, other social media handles, and on your own website.

7.Footer Link Optimization

It has been observed that the footer links are ignored by the search engines. The more links you add at the footer of your website, the more are the chances of getting everything complicated. So, the search engines, especially Google, devalue the footer links.

This might lead to a great harm to your SEO strategy. Thus, these links need to be optimized in accordance with your SEO strategy. You can avail expert SEO services to optimize the footer links of your local business website. A few points must be kept in mind while you optimize footer links for SEO:

Your website’s impact on the search engines can be reduced with too many footer links, so keep them less in number.

The footer of your website must be well-organized so your audience is not too distracted and confused. If that happens, your footer links will automatically be devalued as they will not be of any use for the search engine crawlers and the audience.

Avoid using the same links for the header and footer of the website. This is considered as link duplication. If you’ve put a menu in the header don’t put the same in the footer as well. Use different links so that people can be redirected to different pages.

8. NAP Consistency

NAP (Name, Address, and Phone Number) consistency means to ensure the full NAP of your business throughout your website. The NAP must be consistently spread across the whole website, including every page.

The same format of an address as used for NAP on your website can be used for local citations as well, while you’re mentioning your business on the other websites. The services of a competent SEO outsourcing company can be availed to ensure NAP consistency for your business website.

The NAP data is considered by Google to crawl the local business websites and rank them in the geo-targeted Google searches. So, it will help you get a good rank in SERPs.

9.Local On-Page SEO

For the local business, the on-page SEO is very important. The local search listings still give a great weightage to the on-page SEO and thus, local businesses can benefit from this tactic. For better local on-page SEO, you have to add the name of your city or area and a business-related keyword to:

The title tag of your landing page

The H1 tag of your landing page

The URL of your landing page

The content of your landing page

The image ALT attributes of your landing page

This SEO tactic is best done by the professionals providing expert SEO services. Thus, you can call for them and have your local on-page SEO corrected.

10.Link Building and Citations

It is important to focus on link building while your local SEO campaigns are going on. Unlike the general SEO campaigns, the local SEO campaigns can greatly benefit from getting links from the other local business websites delivering similar products or services.

The focus is on getting links from the local websites and not on getting them from the high-authority websites. Though it’s obvious that the latter is always a great benefit. So, get engaged in link building and citations with your local business mates that are also engaged in a similar business.

The process of link building can be effectively carried by the best SEO outsourcing company.

Thus, you can always call the professionals near you and get your work done.

With all these local SEO ranking factors, you can help your business find a better place in the search engine results. Thus, your local customers will be able to easily find you on the Google search results.

About the Author

Ankit Goyal is the Digital Marketing Expert at SoftProdigy, specializing in PPC. With years of expertise in PPC, Ankit has worked his way towards achieving the perfection of PPC skills.
Passionate about his work, he keeps in touch with the latest digital marketing trends and excellently executes them through his work. Ankit’s marketing brilliance snaps into action when it comes to delivering flawless PPC Management Services. It’s his zeal to learn and delivery of high-quality services that help him keep his clients happy and satisfied.

For businesses, especially the small ones, it is very important to promote themselves in their local area. And Google, along with other search engines, has acknowledged this need long ago. This is why Local SEO came into the picture. Local SEO is spe...